Founded in 1970, De Noorderbrug offers personal assistance and care to approximately 1,400 persons who have a physical handicap, suffer limitations from brain damage or are deaf or hard of hearing. Care provision ranges from ad-hoc care to providing living facilities.

At De Noorderbrug, the entire IT falls under the responsibility of the Economische en Administratieve Dienst (Economical and Administrative Service or EAD) department which has a dedicated co-ordinator for IT. Effectively, De Noorderbrug has outsourced
its IT activities to ComPromise, a service provider which handles the functional and infrastructural maintenance and management for De Noorderbrug. ComPromise also provides crucial consultancy services as well as an end-to-end scaleable IT infrastructure at predictable costs.

In the northern and eastern regions of the Netherlands, De Noorderbrug has approximately eighty sites where its customers can obtain accommodation. De Noorderbrug employs a staff of approximately nine hundred, the major part of which is involved in care provision and customer support. The service agency in Groningen has forty employees and houses the management as well as the Human Resources, Material Affairs and EAD departments.

The customer personal assistance and care to about 1,400 physically handicapped 80 sites in northern and eastern Netherlands about 900 employees

Outdated infrastructure
In 2004, De Noorderbrug had a Windows® NT-based network with twenty ISDN dial-up connections. Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 was deployed to offer the employees at all the branches the CURA application and Microsoft® Outlook on the basis of a server-based model. Microsoft® Office was used on the basis of a client-server model and deployed locally on all desktop computers at the various branches.

The hardware had become rather outdated and required a relatively large amount of on-site maintenance. Because
De Noorderbrug has a lot of branches, it was not possible to solve all problems from a remote location, so troubleshooting took up a relatively large portion of the IT department’s time.

Because De Noorderbrug only had twenty ISDN dial-up boxes (set up at the service agency), no more than twenty employees were able to use the dial-up facilities at a time. As a result of this limitation, it sometimes proved a real challenge to get information across to all the end users at the right location and in timely fashion. Since care registration was a manual process, this also resulted in a lot of extra work, on the work floor as well as in the administrative department.

New care registration system
When, towards the end of 2004, De Noorderbrug decided to migrate to an automated care registration system (FORUM from Getronics PinkRoccade), it had to work out how the system should be offered to the end users. It discovered that the existing infrastructure did not meet the minimal requirements for the software. A number of scenarios were evaluated, and eventually De Noorderbrug opted for an end-to-end server-based architecture on the Citrix platform. It also decided to outsource the maintenance and management to ComPromise on the basis of service level agreements. The quality of the service provision was kept transparent by means various monthly reports and regular meetings.

The challenge large amount of onsite maintenance required for outdated hardware change to an automated care registration system limited number of dial in connections

In order to optimise management, the service provider went on to replace all hardware with IGEL thin clients in a phased way. “The hardware had become considerably outdated,” comments Arjan Oldenkamp, who acts as the contact at ComPromise for IT-related issues at De Noorderbrug. “It required a substantial management effort and a lot of maintenance work, so it was a relatively expensive setup. We replaced practically everything, from the servers, desktops and printers to the infrastructure proper. At all the locations the ISDN connections have been exchanged for SDSL.”

De Noorderbrug now has 9 IBM xSeries servers and 229 IGEL Linux-based thin clients. All applications – CURA, FORUM, Microsoft® Office and Exchange – now work according to the server-based model. The thin clients have been installed at all the branches of De Noorderbrug and are used by staff members to access company applications on the closed private network.

The solution 9 IBM xSeries Servers Citrix Metaframe 229 IGEL Linux thin clients

The possibility to trust the entire IT to a single party and the high level of service and flexibility provided by ComPromise were the deciding factors behind the selection of this particular service provider. ComPromise’s positive experiences with IGEL, the short lines of communication with this supplier and the price/performance ratio of the thin clients were also instrumental in this decision.

As a result of the deployment of a server-based architecture based on Citrix and IGEL, the information provision to all the various branches has improved considerably. The number of available lines no longer constitutes a limitation. In addition, any barriers towards outsourcing maintenance and management were also reduced, due in part to the transparent cost structure.

Since ComPromise charges a fixed rate per workspace, De Noorderbrug knows exactly what the monthly operational IT costs will be. This means the organisation has quick insight into the additional costs that would be involved if De Noorderbrug were to expand the number of workspaces. “Thanks to the deployment of the thin clients, the management costs per workspace have decreased by 15 to 30 £ a month,” calculates Oldenkamp. In the case of De Noorderburg, this results in a minimum saving on management costs of approximately 40,000 £ a year.